In wireless signal transmission, a base station can use two antennas per transmission to improve signal reception at a mobile device. The base station can apply downlink transmit diversity which utilizes a second antenna to transmit a different version of a signal. The mobile device must be configured to detect when the base station is utilizing downlink transmit diversity. The base station can indicate that transmit diversity is being utilized via higher layer messaging. However, the mobile device cannot access such messages until it is connected to the core network after initial signal acquisition.